Silent Voices

March 11, 2013
Northumbrian Det. Insp. Vera Stanhope makes her winning U.S. debut in this mildly chaotic police procedural, the fourth entry in a series that’s the basis for Vera, a British TV crime show now filming its third season. When Vera discovers the strangled body of social worker Jenny Lister in the steam room of Newcastle’s Willows Health Club, she assembles her irreverent but loyal crew, who start interviewing the staff. They eventually focus on Danny Shaw, the club’s sly temporary cleaner. Meanwhile, Vera discovers a strong link between several women in Jenny’s village, Barnard Bridge, who all have ties to Jenny and her work with foster families and adoptions. The entire team wisely uses an investigator’s greatest resource: village gossip. Yet it is Stanhope herself—a homely, overweight spinster with blotchy skin, a fondness for alcohol, and a toxic personality—who, using intuition and subtle intimidation, brings all the disorganization to an illogical but satisfying conclusion.

March 15, 2013
The U.S. introduction to that scruffy, tactless, unloved loner, middle-aged Inspector Vera Stanhope. Struggling to get in shape at the Willows Health Club, DI Vera Stanhope, of the Northumbria Police, heads from the swimming pool to the steam room, where she discovers a dead woman curled up in a corner, a victim of strangulation. Social worker Jenny Lister had at least three excellent reasons to get murdered. First, she evidently had a secret lover. Second, she may have seen the person pilfering the staff lockers. Third, she was once involved with the Elias Jones case, in which a young tot's mum drowned him in a bid to retain her man's love. The case also caused Connie Masters, the caseworker Jenny supervised, to be pilloried by the press and fired. Coincidentally, Connie is now living in Jenny's small village, where social arbiter Veronica Eliot seems determined to make her life hell. With her customary lack of grace, Vera is soon antagonizing witnesses and relying on her second-in-command, young Sgt. Joe Ashworth, to smooth matters over. Jenny's daughter Hannah and Veronica's son Simon, who agreed to defer their marriage at their mothers' insistence, may be above suspicion, but everyone else is fair game--particularly Danny Shaw, a student working as the Willows' janitor, until he too is strangled. Tedious interrogations reveal age-old parent-child brouhahas, one of which will eventually jeopardize Connie and her daughter and force Ashworth into the role of hero. It's easy to admire Vera's brainpower but hard to overlook her mean-spirited management style. Still, her adventures, of which this is the fourth, have been a hit on British television, and readers devoted to Cleeves' tales of Jimmy Perez (Blue Lightning, 2010, etc.) will want to give Vera a try.

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Starred review from May 1, 2013
Vera Stanhope, the overweight, unfashionable, irascible, and brilliant detective inspector with the Northumbria police, has been going great guns in the UK for yearsfive novels have appeared, and an ITV dramatization, Vera, is in its third season. This mystery, the fourth in the series, introduces U.S. readers to a woman who feels a bit guilty that a good murder case always lifts her spirits. A stab at getting fit puts Vera right in a crime scene this time, at the very fitness center where Vera has been hopelessly doing laps on the advice of her doctor. Vera sits in the steam room after her laps, feeling very bulky and out of place, envying the woman with the long lean legs who seems so relaxed next to hera little too relaxed. Vera discovers that the woman is dead. The unraveling of the mystery that ensues delivers a deft blending of contemporary forensic analysis and old-fashioned interviewing that branches out from the fitness center (this is a locked-room mystery, at least to begin with) to the murdered woman's family and acquaintances. It's Vera herself that makes the novel. The way Cleeves presents the point of view of a woman who is both vain and can't-be-bothered yet always aware of her own shambling appearance and of what may lie beneath other people's polished appearances is priceless. A nice mixture, in the British tradition, of social comedy and detective work. More Vera, please.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)